


hero.

by Anonymous



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: /?/, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25350622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: If only they hadn’t met under the smog of destruction by their own two hands or beneath the glow of cheap fluorescent gas station lights.
Relationships: Bang Chan/Kim Woojin
Kudos: 5
Collections: Anonymous





	hero.

Chan thinks… He should’ve killed him then, when the both of them were only two tiny beings too powerful for their world. Before they could become anything more than two simple forces at play. Back then when Chan was only the shadow and Woojin was only the light.

Chan should’ve stopped him before white turned pink then red… 

But he was like a star, holding in just the palm of his hand the gravitational pull of a billion planets. 

And how Chan rode towards him like a lost ship in the night.

Maybe Chan was afraid to stuff out the light… and maybe he still is… Maybe it’s because Chan enabled Woojin’s glow and let it extend so far over the ocean’s waves that he drowned out every other light in the world.

It was Chan’s fault that Woojin died.

_ (It wasn’t) _

It was Chan’s fault that the world fell with him. 

_ (There was nothing he could have done.) _

When Chan first met Woojin, his first thought had been how dearly he wished to have his hands around the hero’s throat and his knife knife in Woojin’s heart.

_ (Though, at the time, Chan had only known Woojin as Apollo, the rising sun hero.) _

The two of them had been black then-- dripping with abhorrence and blood.

_ (It was another hero’s blood that seeped into Woojin’s white uniform and splattered across Chan’s fist.) _

Chan doesn’t recall their first words, but he knows Apollo had muttered something under his breath, something Chan heard clearly enough, something that upset him more than anything even Jisung had done up to that point. 

And Chan also knows that he let the cold bleed from his hands onto the rough texture of concrete and debris scattered across barren streets. 

He also knows how confident he had been then, with Chan’s only competition being himself. 

_ (A bad man, people would whisper, a bad man born with too much power in his bones.) _

How confused Chan had been when his reach failed to extend beyond a ten meter radius as Woojin, with his gift of sun, doused Chan’s own gift as if it were a candle’s flame battling a pitcher’s fill of water. 

Humiliation was something Chan handled badly back then, when he wore his emotions on his sleeve. 

_ (He’d suffered enough to know the consequences of blinding emotions, but it never stopped him then.) _

Had Jisung not’ve swept in, guns blazing, Chan might have abruptly ended his own life short while blindly chasing the grinning Apollo between collapsing skyscrapers flying fire.

Chan believes Woojin hated him at first.

He knows Woojin despised seeing Chan at every turn, always getting in the way of his “work”. 

Ironically enough, Woojin also had a knack for interrupting Chan’s own ‘work’. 

Though, for Chan, it wasn’t so much a job as it was a lifestyle…

The second time the two crossed paths, their masks had hidden underneath a facade of normalcy. 

Of course, Chan didn’t know then, the secrets Woojin both carried with him, but a Chance meeting and their paths became so deeply intertwined without Chan even realizing.

They had been young then. Woojin had been a college student a couple credits short of graduation and Chan was a lousy gas station attendant who worked more hours than the other part-timers combined. 

Woojin slipped into Chan’s life so easily and became the thing Chan looked forward to most during those long shifts. 

Chan believes Woojin must have found him amusing and quite the idiot. Chan hopes that he had been the small spark of enjoyment in Woojin’s busy life in the way the other had been to him.

The two of them bonded over instant ramen and expired milk, ugly fluorescent lights blinking above us with every shift of the wind. 

The two of them had been handed cards too young, cards that were impossible to throw away.

Maybe that was why they hit it off so well.

_ (Back then, Woojin had whispered secrets to Chan about his life.-- just bits here and there, but enough about his family situation for Chan two put two and two together. Enough that Chan knew there had been many reasons why Woojin stayed late into the night at the rundown gas station instead of returning home to the expensive mansion at the top of the hill. _

_ Chan knew Woojin kept many secrets, but he didn’t realize how many Woojin kept close to his heart till the days when paths crossed and intertwined too acutely that it was impossible to tell which one belonged to the other and which belonged to Chan.) _

And somehow, those moments Chan held close to his heart bled into the deepest parts of them, slipping between the masks they carried and the secrets they both hid. 

Maybe Chan doesn’t remember when apathy grew to muted acceptance then to something forbidden, but Chan knows it was Woojin who shifted the ground beneath Chan’s very feet. Who’s words changed the world Chan believed he lived in. 

It was Woojin’s light that caught Chan in his trap-- his light that Changed him. Woojin drained black dyes from the threads of their string of fate and left them white.

It was strange, in a way, the way Chan and Woojin turned out. 

_ (Or better put, Woojin and Chan… their orders are interchangeable but yield separate results. In the history books, Woojin’s name always came first. Woojin was the hero of this story, not so much Chan.) _

Chan lost his reason when Woojin wormed his way into his life. 

Chan gave up his flight to the stars and beyond just to watch Woojin ascend beyond the skies Chan could never see past. 

For Chan, those days, when Woojin was the symbol of something better, seem so far away now. It all feels, to him, like a fever dream with the world collapsing between his weak grasps.

Woojin and Chan are very different.

Chan never harbored the powers that Woojin did and he doesn’t mean the ones that melted stone and burned ice-- no, Chan’s never had the ones that Woojin held in his heart, the ones that fueled his light. 

Because the thing about Woojin was that he was always capable of doing good and he had a heart big enough for even those who’d consider breaking his own neck for their climb to the top.

Chan learned, watching the collapse of the world Woojin sought to protect, a power like his is a once in a lifetime thing to come by. 

Woojin  _ (or Apollo-- the details don’t matter much to Chan) _ was, to put it simply, a miracle. 

And it was because Woojin was such a magical thing, that when his end came, the world lost it’s own will.

_ (In a way, Chan lost his too.) _

Chan’s never been like Woojin. 

Chan held the crumbs of the world in his hands, but in the end, Chan could only stand idly by. 

And, Chan has shit memory  _ (something he attributes to the multiple head injuries he received over the course of his life) _ and can barely handle his job as one of the last memories of before the end. 

Woojin was always good at remembering things.

He could recite Chan’s first words like it was something that rolled in the back of his mind often (and maybe it was) and Chan’s sure, if he asked, Woojin would’ve known the very first words he said to Chan (the ones that threw Chan into an icy rage that nearly leveled a block) and could throw them to Chan quicker than Chan could even say ‘i love you’. 

But, it’s not as if Chan can ask Woojin to retell our stories for him anymore.

Because he’s gone now, and Chan watched him drown in a sea of flames. 

Back then, before they both  _ knew _ each other, how dearly Chan wished he’d  _ just die _ .

If it weren’t such a soul crushing train of thought nowadays, Chan would even say it’s funny how much has Changed. 

And, if Chan could go back, Chan would.

Not to Change anything-- Chan doesn’t think he would be capable of Changing the timeline when everything winds itself so tightly around the one thing in the world Chan could never lay a finger on. 

No, Chan wouldn’t go back to Change the world. Instead, he’d just like to watch and try to ingrain every shared memory between Woojin and Chan into the crevices of his mind.

But knowing Chan, that’d likely never be enough. 

He’d forget, get distracted, and miss the details; how black fell to white, white grew pink, and pink blossomed to red. 

If only Woojin and Chan never met. How easy life would have been for the two of them.

_ (Maybe not so much easy, but how simple.) _

If only they hadn’t met under the smog of destruction by their own two hands or beneath the glow of cheap fluorescent gas station lights.

If only they hadn’t gripped that slim chance of  _ intimacy _ they’s lost before like a lifeline. If only they had turned fate down instead of riding it up to the stars like a chariot. 

If only there’d been another way. 

But there wasn’t and a scarlet camellia withers, cracking with age, sat atop a greying marble tombstone. 

Apollo is the name inscribed on the slab.

_ (Chan believes that Woojin should have been the name written in cursive.  _

_ He was more than his mask.  _

_ But it doesn’t matter now.  _

_ Only Chan visits Woojin.  _

_ Chan and Woojin. _

_ Woojin and Chan.) _

**Author's Note:**

> hi hi,,, i dont write much because i suck at putting my thoughts into words,,, i had this idea, and id love to add more to it but idk if i have the brain power for that OTL 
> 
> maybe i'll make this into a series and actually elaborate on everythins sksksksks
> 
> but anyways, tysm for reading this all the way thru!


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